SELECTION 2009

Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream is a critically acclaimed book by Sam Quinones, currently a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.  Published by the University of New Mexico Press, and based on research Quinones did while living and working in Mexico as a free-lance journalist from 1994 to 2004, the book is a collection of “true tales of Mexican migration” that the author summarizes as follows:

         “The stories in this book . . . are not a coherent whole of the immigration epic.  They are tales that I loved telling that I hope also tell some of what I think is the essence of the greatest movement of humna beings from one coutnry to another in our time.
         “The first, middle and last chapters are about the young construction worker, Delfino Juarez. . . .
         “Atolingans in Chicago is about the distraction of returning home and how small-town envy was defeated.  The complex motivations behind one immigrant’s return are found in the Tomato King’s story.
         “The saga of South Gate is about how America has changed Mexican immigrants.  The 2003 season of the high-school soccer team in Garden City, Kansas, is about how Mexicans have changed America.
         “Velvet painting’s emergence in Cuidad Juarez is the story of when the U.S.-Mexico border became a place where poor people could remake themselves.  Opera’s emergence in Tijuana is how therapeutic can be the distance from Mexico City.”

Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream received critical praise in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, National Public Radio and elsewhere upon its release in 2007.  Quinones’ first book, True Tales from Another Mexico (2001) has been used in more than 150 university classes at 75 universities across the country.  Quinones himself has been called “"the most original American writer on the border and Mexico out there."